Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Last Saturday, many of you here in San Diego participated in the first of many to come, Rock Church park cleanups. Over 1,000 volunteers came early in the morning to Balboa Park for planting, cleaning, landscaping, bbqing, and good times.

The day got rolling around 8am when volunteers lined up to get their shirts and sign in. Then people broke off into 3 main groups which then were regrouped and sent to every corner of balboa park to get their task completed before lunch. It was amazing to see the amount of work that was done all over the park in such a short amount of time. The Rock Church went through plenty of efforts and paperwork to get this event all organized and prepped to handle 1,000 volunteers, but they did it!

Plant With Purpose staff was there all day to meet and thank all the volunteers for giving their time to make this fine city a cleaner place. With a strategically placed Plant With Purpose table (right next to the start of the line for the bbq lunch provided by a local catering company and the Rock), our staff was able to talk to countless numbers of people about the work that we do in developing countries to improve the lives of the rural poor. The volunteers were already jazzed about their efforts there at the park and then the news about a Christian non-profit organization based in San Diego that has been teaching sustainable agriculture for 25 years really got them pumped. Plus they had to listen if they wanted to get their free bbq lunch, talk about a captive audience.

-Balboa Park is the largest cultural complex west of the Mississippi River. It is maintained by the City of San Diego and covers about 1,200 acres, and is only minutes away from downtown San Diego.

-Within the park there are fifteen museums and various performing arts groups, including the Old Globe Theatre, and a total of over 85 cultural and recreational organizations. The park also contains the world famous San Diego Zoo, which itself takes up 100 acres.

-Balboa Park is also home rose gardens, butterfly garden, some rare plant species, 58 different varieties of palm trees, and to top it off a Botanical Building with over 2,000 different tropical plants.

-Many of the museums are in Spanish Colonial buildings which were originally built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. This marked the first time that this architectural style was used in this country.